The present invention relates generally to round balers, and more particularly to an adjustment apparatus for a round baler that enables the lower bale forming roll position to be altered for optimal positioning for the crop being baled.
In the crop packaging industry, generally a smaller part of the cattle/dairy industry, round balers have become quite prevalent for their capability of producing a conveniently sized cylindrical bale. Prior art round balers generally have a bale-forming chamber defined by an apron comprising an array of side-by-side belts, transverse slats trained on chains, a plurality of rolls or a combination of these various elements, e.g., rolls and belts. Crop material is picked up from the ground as the baler travels across the field, and is fed into a fixed or expandable chamber where it is rolled up to form a compact cylindrical hay package. A wide array of crop material, such as hay, straw, or silage may be fed into the baler creating the need to adjust the way in which crop material is fed into and handled by the bale forming apparatus.
Testing on roll belt round balers has demonstrated that the optimal lower bale forming roll position differs for different machine configurations and for different crops. Providing the capability for alternate lower bale forming roll position requires producing multiple variations of the relatively robust main frame which provides support for the bale forming rolls or providing multiple roll mounts in a single main frame. It is not practical to build multiple versions of baler main frames and base units to accommodate different roll locations. Incorporating multiple roll mounting locations may not be achievable if the variation in mounting positions is small. Additionally, bale forming rolls are subjected to significant loads by the incoming crop and bale so that any mechanism that provides the capability of altering the roll position must be suitably robust to withstand the structural loads.